


no one is ever going to want me

by green_piggy



Series: bond writes for xbc femslash week 2021 [7]
Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Roleswap, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, everyone! needs! THERAPY!, mild Self-harm, suicidal character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:08:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29412405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/green_piggy/pseuds/green_piggy
Summary: While repairing the Monoceros’ controls, Patroka is visited by Mythra, and the two of them stew in their contempt for a world that has been nothing but cruel to them.
Relationships: Benkei | Patroka/Hikari | Mythra
Series: bond writes for xbc femslash week 2021 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2149800
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: Xenoblade Femslash Week 2021





	no one is ever going to want me

**Author's Note:**

> for day 7 "roleswap!"
> 
> and with that, xenoblade femslash week is FINISHED... for this year :3
> 
> title is named after [this song](https://youtu.be/xMK7IHF69Sc), which i maintain is the most mythra-core song i’ve ever heard
> 
> SPOILERS FOR THE FIC: roleswap is that mythra and malos swapped fates at the end of the tornan war. that is, mythra fell into the cloud sea. addam finds malos’s barely living body and, consumed by guilt over what happened to mythra (and knowing, deep inside, that malos’s nature is his driver’s fault and not his own, just as mythra’s flaws are addam’s own), chooses to seal malos away instead of killing him
> 
> maybe one day i’ll write a fic with mythra where i don’t slag addam off. today is not that day. sorry dude i promise you’re one of my fave characters

“Oi, Patroka.”

It wasn’t as though Patroka was _busy,_ per say, but she was still surprised that the Aegis herself was seeking her out yet again. She seemed to do that a lot, for one reason or another. Certainly not one that Patroka could name. She knew fully well that she was pretty terrible company any time she didn’t have a weapon in hand.

Still, she’d take seeing Mythra over anyone else in their dumb little group. Over Akhos’s stupid voice going _“oh sister, sister!”._ Over Mikhail being his usual shitty self, no matter how many snapped wrists she gave him that had him running off to her brother to be healed. Over Jin’s utterly blank face, cooler than absolute zero, colder still than the chunk of ice they kept his original Driver’s corpse in.

...Which was, in Patroka’s not-so-humble opinion, _extremely_ weird.

She made her mind go back to more important things; to Mythra, arms crossed as she leaned against the doorway, her eyebrows arched and a slight smirk on her face. She kicked herself off against the doorframe and sauntered down the steps, stopping next to Patroka with her hands on her hips.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“I was just about to head back,” Patroka said. Her hands skimmed over the control panels for the Monoceros. “Just recalibrating these bastards. A few of the controls were acting up during our last fight.”

“Huh.”

Mythra swerved on her foot, her long hair shimmering like a strand of sunlight out behind her. Patroka expected her to stomp right out of the room, grumbling under her breath about how bored she was, but she plonked herself on the steps and rested her cheek on her hand.

“You, uh, you don’t have to stay,” Patroka said.

Mythra — the Aegis, the destroyer of countless Titans, the strongest being in all of Alrest — stuck out her tongue.

Rolling her eyes, Patroka turned back to the console and couldn’t quite work out why she was smiling. To be fair, seeing Mythra didn’t make her want to punch something, which was more than what she could say about most people… but that seemed like barely crossing over the bar when said bar was buried six foot under.

She couldn’t lie, though. Working while Mythra was watching her, feeling her gaze on her back, made her nervous in a way that she couldn’t identify.

It didn’t take much longer, thankfully. With a bit of brute force and wrestling with the controls, she managed to get all of the systems working as they should. When Patroka gave it a little parting kick, she could just about hear a snort from behind.

_“So!”_ Patroka clapped her hands up and down against each other. “Whatcha need?”

Mythra gazed up at her from her perch on the second-bottom step, hand still on her cheek. She looked bored, if Patroka had to put a name to the face.

For a long moment, she didn’t speak, and just as Patroka considered awkwardly shuffling around to the other side’s steps—

“I wanna go to the roof,” Mythra said. “Come with me.”

Though she had worded it like a command, Patroka knew that she could ignore it if she really wanted to. Mythra wasn’t their leader, after all, despite her power. When Patroka had first joined, she’d made the mistake of asking why a random Flesh Eater was in charge, and not, y’know, someone who might as well be a god.

Mythra had gone _so_ pale, the palest Patroka had ever seen her, even after all of these years, before storming off. And even now, Patroka still didn’t get why.

Well, whatever. Wasn’t like any of them were running a therapist service.

When Mythra pushed herself onto her feet and walked off, her footsteps heavy against the metallic flooring, the clanking of Patroka’s geta soon echoed in union.

Outside was a perfectly bland night. There were some clouds drifting along the sky, obscuring some of the stars. Perhaps Akhos would have waxed poetry about its beauty, some kind of nonsense that Patroka would have chuffed him over the head for. She’d never been much of an appreciator for nature, not when that same world had fucked her over time and time _again._

Everyone else was, for one reason or another, on the Marsanes itself. Patroka had gone over to fix the Monoceros’ systems herself, and she was surprised that she’d been followed at all. She couldn’t possibly begin to imagine what had inspired Mythra to come all the way over, trudging from one wharf to another. The port that they were docked at, at an industrial city called Yukrit, was perched on Mor Ardain’s mid-back. The city itself was so chaotic and clustered that nobody batted an eyelid at their ships, even though one of them was clearly not from modern times and the other didn’t require a Titan to sail.

Honestly. Just yet another example of how _stupid_ humans were.

Elsewhere on Alrest, the sky probably would have been more visible, but pollution choked it tight, a blanket smothering out most light.

But not the World Tree. It hung tall in the sky, stretching beyond the heavens themselves, gleaming that gentle blue that made Patroka want to reach out and crush it in her hand.

When she glanced over to Mythra, she saw her fists curl tight around the railing, and knew that she wasn’t the only one. The drunken laughter of humans drifted up from below. Patroka watched Mythra’s hands clench even tighter. It was only when the metal began to squeak that Patroka thought to herself that she should probably do something.

“Hey, c’mon.” Patroka’s fingers wrapped around Mythra’s and gently tugged. Definitely not in a _romantic_ way, or anything gross like that, but the human heart inside her chest still skipped a beat. “They’re not worth it.”

“I know that!” Mythra snapped. Still, she yanked her hands away as if they’d been burnt. She crossed her arms and dug her nails into her elbows, which… wasn’t much of an improvement, but it was a little? Maybe? “I _know_ that.”

“Humans suck.”

_“Especially_ Drivers."

“Uh-huh.”

Patroka’s answers were half-hearted at best. Not because she didn’t want to talk, but because she could sense Mythra ready to erupt, her fingers fisting and loosening repeatedly, her jaw jutting out from how tightly she was clenching her teeth.

And, sure enough:

“Do you have any idea what it was like, drifting in the Cloud Sea while I was barely clinging to life?” Mythra spat from out of nowhere. She ran her hands over her hair and gritted her teeth, her eyes flashing. The broken Core Crystal on her chest flickered like a struggling heartbeat, glowing a brilliant green, save for the hideous slash mark across its centre. “Architect, I — I don’t even know why the hell I survived, y’know? My Driver definitely didn’t want me to.”

“He didn’t..?” Patroka had heard this tale before, but Mythra always revealed a new detail each time she retold it. It was like attempting to extract information from a boulder. Slow, _agonising,_ and, honestly? Probably not worth the fuss, but you still managed to get little bits eventually.

_Eventually._

This detail, though, was a new one. Mythra never talked about her first Driver. It was a topic that Patroka had long since carefully filed under _“don’t ask her about it if you value your life."_

There were quite a few things that she had in there.

“I’m the _Aegis,”_ Mythra said, and Patroka had never heard her sound so miserable before. “Even when the connection between us was severed, I could still faintly sense his emotions for a while.”

Patroka tilted her head.

Mythra’s hand curled into a fist in front of her. “He was _relieved.”_ She barked out a wet laugh, one that sounded so horrible and so broken that Patroka didn’t know what the hell to do about it. “He was a bit sad, yeah, but all I could sense was overwhelming relief. That he could go back to his little farming life and not have to worry about me and my power ‘cause I was _dead.”_

“The ‘great’ Prince Addam, right?”

Mythra snorted. “The one and only.”

“Sounds like a dick to me.”

“Yeah, no kiddin’.” Still, Mythra’s face was solemn, so Patroka mentally prepared herself. Really, she didn’t know why she was still here. If anyone else talked for half as long as Mythra was doing, she would have seen herself out long ago.

But Mythra… wasn’t so bad. Definitely not nearly as bad as she herself seemed to believe that she was.

Then again, even Patroka’s own Driver had always believed in her, right up until Patroka had gobbled them up. Wasn’t that the single most fundamental and important rule for any bond between Blade and Driver? Even if said Blade was the Aegis, that didn’t change the fact that Mythra… was still a Blade. She wasn’t so different from the rest of them. It wasn’t as though she’d been born asking for power enough to fell a Titan with a single thought. Being terrified of your Blade for something that they couldn’t control… that sounded like it _sucked._

“I tried to contain my power,” Mythra eventually continued. “I really did. I tried to help people! I wanted to save them! And I _still_ ended up destroying so many Titans. Ended up ruining so many lives.” She tilted her head away, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I wanted to die in the Cloud Sea. I didn’t want to come back. But if I couldn’t die… well. Might as well do what I was apparently born to do, right?”

If you couldn’t change your destiny, embrace it… Patroka could get that. It wasn’t as though this world had given them any other chance.

Mythra’s teeth clenched together so tightly that Patroka could hear them grind. She swept her arm out with a snarl.

“And then I come back and discover that he’d found the other Aegis — the one that we had fought together to destroy, and he just—” Mythra threw her arms up in the air. “—he just sealed Malos away! He left his own Blade to die, but oh _no,_ not his enemy!”

For a second, right before she twisted her head away, Patroka watched Mythra’s lips twist, saw her take a deep breath, unable to look away from the shine in her golden eyes. She tilted her head back, saying nothing, and not even Patroka was cruel enough to point out the obvious.

It was a long while before she spoke, voice broken: “When… when we find Father, I’ll…”

She snarled and threw out her hand. A beam of light broke through the clouds, piercing right through an aspid that had been idly wisping its way through the night sky. When the light vanished, not even ash remained.

“I don’t know if I want to kill him,” Mythra confessed, “or if I want him to kill me.”

...Well. What the hell did anyone say to _that?_

Patroka couldn’t understand actively wanting to die. She just… didn’t particularly care if she kicked it or not. Wasn’t like she’d ever be reborn, or remember it even if she could have been.

But, then again, her power was nothing like Mythra’s. The crap that Mythra had been through… no wonder that she was the biggest mess of them all.

The noises of the people at the port had fallen completely silent. When Patroka peaked over the railing, a part of her thrilled in the terror painted across their faces, their trembling arms as they pointed to the dancing sparks of light on the horizon, but she twisted her head back at a loud slam — Mythra’s fist hitting the wall.

Holding back a quiet sigh, Patroka walked over to her and tugged her hand away. She didn’t mention the hot, furious tears dripping down Mythra’s face. “C’mon, we can’t draw attention to ourselves. You can beat the loving shit out of the Architect as much as you want when we find him, but we can’t find him if we don’t get a way to the World Tree first. And even before _that,_ we gotta find the other Aegis and get your powers back.”

“I _know,”_ Mythra hissed. She hiccupped before pulling her hand away. “Shut up.”

“What’s up with all the monologuing, anyway? Usually can’t get two words out of you about that kinda stuff.”

Mythra bit her lip. “It’s just… it’s been on my mind, all right?” She scrubbed at her eyes, digging her fingers deep into the sockets. “And I don’t like thinking about it, but it’s all I can think about, lately.”

“And that’s why you went looking for me?”

A minute shrug. “I guess? I dunno.” Mythra was glaring at the floor now, not quite looking at Patroka. “I just… wanted to see you, I suppose.”

Oh. _Well._ Wasn’t that flattering?

"Well. Uh." Patroka stretched the back of her neck with a frown. "Thanks?"

Mythra snorted. "Man, you're dense."

_"Oi."_

It was a half-hearted protest, though. Mythra had a slight smile, even if it was blemished by her reddened wet cheeks and swollen eyes. It was still… nice, seeing her smile.

"Wanna spar?"

"Huh?"

Patroka rolled her eyes and gave a smirk. "Man, you're dense."

"H-hey-!"

The sparking of Patroka's weapon around her hand cut off Mythra's own protest. "I could probably sense your pent up energy from another Titan. Get some of it out. Just _don't_ use Foresight."

Not that Mythra wouldn't stomp the ground with her even without Foresight, but Patroka had to at least try. One day, she'd be able to best Mythra in combat. It wasn't as though they were _that_ unevenly matched; truthfully, it was a thrill fighting against someone who actually put up a challenge. The song of their weapons clashing always made Patroka's blood sing.

Grinning, Mythra held out her hand. The magnificent Aegis Sword, not quite complete, gleamed to life in a ray of pure light. There were chips and cracks in the blade, reflecting the state of her own Core Crystal, but there was still nothing that could stand in her way. "Since you're askin' for it, sure!"

Mirroring Mythra's grin, Patroka shot forward with a mighty roar.

The next morning, they had to move their ships elsewhere after the concerned murmurs of the citizens, about how light seared and screamed throughout the night as the very Titan itself seemed to tremble and quake. Akhos yelled at them a bit. Mikhail didn’t even get halfway through whatever he was saying before Patroka shoved a fist into his mouth. Jin said nothing, but the disappointment emitting from him in waves might as well have been drowning. Nia, a relatively recent addition, only rolled her eyes before trotting away on her Blade.

It was all worth it, though, to see Mythra flash Patroka a wide grin, her haunted eyes looking lighter than they had done for a long while.

That treacherous human heart inside of her gave another skip at the sight, and Patroka couldn’t work out _why._

Still, it felt… nice. Maybe she didn’t need to work out why. Maybe just making that smile appear was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> [ [twitter](https://twitter.com/greenpiggles) ]
> 
> and a huge HUGE thank you to [@XBCFemslash](https://twitter.com/XBCFemslash) for organising such a lovely and fantastic event!! i've had SUCH a blast creating for this and seeing everyone else's work! <3 thank you for encouraging us to create the femslash content the xenoblade series deserves!!


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